AMD’s Barcelona delayed until August

"Mid-year" typically means June, so with AMD's formal announcement of an …

AMD has been claiming "mid-year" for Barcelona for some time now, and for most of us that meant "June." But the company announced today that their next-generation quad-core chip will launch on an unspecified date in August at clockspeeds of "up to 2GHz." In a recent interview with InfoWorld, AMD's Kevin Knox insisted that the coming launch will not be just a paper one and that they expect to have the parts available in volume on the launch date.

AMD will launch both the standard and low-power Barcelona parts on the same day, with systems available from platform partners starting in September. September puts them into possible 45nm Penryn territory, though, so we'll have to see what Intel has in that timeframe.

Then the Inquirer, which puts the precise ship date for Barcelona-based products from AMD's platform partners at September 10 (happy birthday to me), has purported info on pricing, model numbers, TDP ratings, and speed bins for the upcoming launch. All of this being from "sources in Taiwan," it should be taken with the usual grain of rice reserved for anonymous statements coming from the country that's the source of 90% of the world's tech rumors.

I have to say, though, if the Inq is correct and a 2.0GHz quad-core Barcelona really does set you back $390, then the fact that as of July 22nd you'll be able to get a 2.0GHz quad-core Xeon DP for $316 is going to hurt. At least, it will hurt if Barcelona doesn't live up to AMD's performance per clock vs. Xeon claims, and if you don't care that the Barcelona part will be four-socket capable (the Xeon DP is two-socket only). And this is really where it gets interesting, because AMD really wants to push multisocket systems. Multisocket, especially at four-socket and above, is where Barcelona has its best chance to shine against Intel.